I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.

I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.

I have this tendency to take a little bit of questionable knowledge and riff on it.

I might take from the current political chaos a desire to somehow reflect its essential qualities in a story - the blatant lies that get accepted with repetition; the way mass media seems to be agitating people en masse; the way, particularly, that a relatively lucky and affluent and privileged population can be undone by a certain spoiled quality; that feeling when two decent people violently disagree, because they are arguing from two non-intersecting data sets - well, the list goes on.

I really wanted to be allowed to the [writer's] table. So it makes me happy to be at the table. It sounds a little shallow, but if I imagine the shadow life, where I didn't get that chance, and all the ways my negative inclinations would have bloomed if I hadn't gotten the attention, but also the creative outlet ... I'm not actually that happy. I have multiplicities. My happiness blooms and it wilts.

I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.

I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.